On the last day of the year, a great disturbance rippled through the Internet. Well, a certain part of the Internet: the section that pays attention to the exploits of brash YouTube celebrities like Logan Paul, a 22-year-old mega-vlogger who has the attention of some 15 million subscribers. On December 31, Paul uploaded a video from his travels in Japan, detailing his trek into the famous Aokigahara “suicide woods” near Mount Fuji, where he found a man who had apparently recently hanged himself. Paul showed the body, with his face blurred out, and filmed his own reaction, at first stunned, and then . . . well, one might say amused.

It didn’t go over well. By New Year’s Day, criticism of Paul was widespread and he issued the first of two apologies. Though, it came off as another crass bit of self-promotion, a fact pointed out in stringent fashion by the Queen of the North herself, Game of Thrones actress Sophie Turner:

Wagons circled, attack mobs formed, and the Internet—or, again, a certain area of it—engaged in a battle of outrage and defense. People on one side were appalled that Paul would post such a video, while also maybe a little glad that he’d given them another concrete thing to throw at him. And his fans—the “Logang,” as Paul calls them—entrenched themselves in loyal service of their pranking, stunting, bragging hero. It’s a familiar narrative. Though a particularly egregious example of witless YouTube content, Paul’s video still seems likely to be only a minor and soon-forgotten bump on the way to whatever YouTube singularity we’re headed toward.

It almost feels like a waste of time, then, to get angry at Paul’s video in particular. Yes, it’s awful and exploitative and is a sterling example of what makes Paul—and his younger, but equally odious brother, Jake Paul—so distressing. But Paul is really just a symptom of a larger problem—one that we’ll all have to reckon with soon enough. Or, really, probably should be already.

Are bros taking over the Internet? Well, watching any of the Paul brothers’ videos, you might be inclined to think that. (Watch Logan brag about his year. And then watch his brother do it.) But there are also all those Nazi dweebs and men’s-rights toads racking up views and swaying people to their terrible causes, and I wouldn’t exactly call them bros. We should still resist most bro culture where we can, absolutely. But it’s only one head of the hydra.

What’s really a problem is something a bit more intangible, more ineffable. It’s the sense that YouTube has created not just its own economy—we’ve heard plenty about that already—but a kind of ethical relativism that, even in the intense glare of mass criticism like Paul got yesterday, seems almost invincible to any outside influence. That’s probably hyperbole, but look at Logan Paul’s second apology video, posted today:

Paul seems teary and contrite, and probably in some senses he genuinely is. But there’s more than a glimmer of inauthenticity here, just as there was in his first apology. That may simply be because Logan Paul is an egomaniac post-adolescent who doesn’t yet have a sense of anything beyond his own nose. But it also shows that the larger and more ardent one’s legion of supporters grows—a self-selecting horde that will not brook criticism of their idol in any form—the less and less external condemnation, or any kind of moral urging, really matters. Sure, almighty brands could back away, but they haven’t been terribly principled about that in the past, and anyway, people like the Pauls are creating their own revenue streams that seem more self-sustaining and less reliant on cozy big-name partnerships.

What will really get to the Paul brothers is plain old time. Their fans are devoted, but they’re young. While I’ve no doubt some of them will stick with the boys as they age together, and new fans will be brought into the fold, an arc like this is rarely a long one. Strains of popular obnoxiousness beloved by teens never really thrive very long in any one form. So, if we are specifically worried about Logan and Jake Paul and their empire of shit, I think we can relax a little.

What should remain troubling is that they will be replaced. And quite likely by more and worse. YouTube culture—perhaps social media in general—exists in a state of entropy. Gamergate gave way to the alt-right, just as whatever you want to call these fratty white boys aping Jackass and appropriating dated hip-hop poses will probably lead to some other horror. Because there hasn’t actually been much done to guide or, frankly, police YouTube by anyone who might have once had the power to do so—other than the creators themselves. Which of course was the egalitarian dream of the platform, one that once sounded nice, as some utopian earlier-Internet ideal. But just as Twitter has shown—in its descent from a forum for amusing one-liners to a hellish bog of harassment and Nazism—when left nearly entirely to its own devices, the central spirit of the Internet hive mind, its great howling id, tends toward darkness.

That may be beyond anyone’s control, really. Sure, Twitter could do more to, say, not verify Nazis. But beyond that, there is something alarmingly impenetrable about these thriving, metastasizing cult-communities. Hand-wringing think pieces may shift or rouse the discourse for those on the outside of all of it, but they likely won’t reach the hearts and minds of those immersed and intoxicated. Or, at best, it will all sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher, honking away in vague tones that communicate nothing but an atomized distance. More fuel is thrown onto that self-contained fire every day, with young audiences receiving their inculcation while parents and guardians figure it all unknowable but harmless.

Every time there is some hue and cry about something like Logan Paul callously filming a dead man hanging from a tree, it’s a pushback that seems totally ineffectual—and ignorant of the scope of what is actually happening with YouTube, which is viewed by many, many young people in a way that is more obsessive and more internalized than probably anything any of us experienced in our own youths. And it has a deviously effective defense system built right in: all that internality suggests that anyone who criticizes it simply doesn’t understand, reifying that sense of belonging for both creator and fan, and pushing everything else further away.

Of course, we’ve seen versions of that same mechanism before. In my teen years, for example, anyone who didn’t like Rent was a real square—or, quite possibly, a homophobe. But Rent was less totalizing; it wasn’t immediately and constantly available in ever-increasing permutations. Rent, or the Beatles, or Pokémon, or whatever, were much easier to put into perspective—and to grow out of—because they were single, fixed entities. So are the Paul brothers and their ilk, who will eventually fade from prominence same as all things. But they are only products of a large and looming factory, one that’s the true subject of all this insulated, recursive devotion. And that’s what should probably worry us. The discrete idiots may come and go, but the idiot machine will still keep churning, loud and autonomous and impervious enough to drown out everything else, until it’s all there is.

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